There’s got to be a better way, or “wherever I go, there I am, blocking my path”: Mazes and Labyrinths, Plans and Accidents

My chronicle has gotten way behind schedule. I still want to write about Napoli, Catania, Venezia, Athens, Irakleio, and Sitia (as I catalog these cities, I straddle my time in Rethimno and as soon as I cross over this wall and hop down to the next backyard, I will have to add it to the list).

First, I have to air some dirty laundry. I have to try to clear my head.

I become dispirited, and so my thoughts and energy diffuse. Or perhaps I am not being fair to myself - maybe I am resilient beyond anyone’s expectations, and I am simply frustrated at my apparent lack of “success” (we may try to define that later). Maybe I despair at the destructive, chaotic, or ineffectual results of my attempts to focus my resources down a particular path. Whatever the reason, I end up not writing.

I haven’t stopped doing, although an increasing percentage of my doing feels like it is happening somewhere five kilometers to one side, and I am observing it in miniature through a telescope. Moments that shake and stir me have dwindled significantly, and with increasing frequency I have the appalling experience of feeling like I am observing a remote-control doll of myself in the moment and not really being in the moment. A side note, remembering something I wrote earlier - one element of this phenomenon is that as my sense of connection with the world around me goes down, my number of photographs goes up. Cause, or effect? Illness, or placebo? Perhaps, adding to the list of potential causes for my malaise, I am only tired.

Also, I am lonely. I don’t believe that she is reading and I’m not naming her anyway, so I hope that no harm is done, but in the course of my trip I confessed attraction to someone whom I met. She was not the only person I have felt attracted to, but she was the first (and in the anticlimactic aftermath, most certainly the only) person on this trip with whom I dared to take action. The outcome of this admission was almost cartoonishly predictable. I could cut up the illustrated storyboards of this event, place them on a pile with other cel drawings from any number of points in my lifetime, grab one edge, thumb the pages with the other hand and show you an animated, silent history of love, but I will not do that.

I noted in an earlier post that I have often experienced my desire as - for lack of a better word - sin. Sin or terrible inconvenience. Emotion and physical desire arrive to me like little kids who pooped themselves in public and whom I have to hurry into a toilet before anyone sees or smells what they did, or like creepy old men who have performed unspeakably disgusting acts in public and about whom the spectrum of responses ranges from pity to revulsion. That is what my self, all of my self that is not my brain, always feels like to me. Emotion and desire are liabilities - they are never okay, they are never safe to have. I talk on and on about them being okay because I am trying to make them okay for myself.

Throughout my travels, most people describe me so consistently (the lodging situations I am using always entail people “rating” one another) that you would be excused for thinking I am giving them suggestions: he is nice, he is educated, he is neat, he is responsible, he is attentive. I am grateful for such kind words, however, these statements do not surprise me about my self or give me hope that some liberation or catharsis is around the corner, ready to leap from the bushes. In the company of some beautiful and amazing people I have seen glimmers of hope that there is something new, or better, about myself that is emerging, but what, and how to make sure that continues to happen? I don't feel beautiful or amazing. As far as I can tell, in the end, they interacted with a version of me that is as old - and as fragrant and delicious - as dust. Nice? Polite? Educated? What part of that is compelling, interesting, or maybe even sexy?

When I set out, I established a metaphor for myself - one of climbing up out of a tomb, of escaping from a prison. As time wears on I fear I am still clambering, or perhaps I have climbed down and up and down again over and over. Have I forged a new trail or am I still beating back brush on ancient paths I have wandered along before and which my feet instinctively return to? I have met some monsters in these narrow lanes - reflections of me I have seen a million times and effortlessly draw, and draw forth, from memory. They are parts of my identity I have wrestled with in a thousand colored pencil dust clouds, albeit in less exotic circumstances than those in which I currently find myself, so to speak.

The worst thing to bear in all of this is the manifest awareness that in mere days, I must return (but must I?). I must go back to where I came from, submit, subdue, subterraneanize, this wanderer, this alleged adventurer, who was first eager, then desperate, then despairing, and as far as I can tell nothing is different about me or about my circumstances (except for the new set of financial and logistical challenges I have adopted by taking this trip).

Let’s talk about mazes and labyrinths. Some make a technical distinction between them. “Maze” signifies what we typically picture, which is to say a confined space that supplies a wide array of possible paths, only one of which leads to the goal or exit, with all others leading to dead ends. In this sense I would say that a maze is meant to challenge, to baffle, probably to defeat. If a maze has feelings, it is probably disappointed when someone escapes. “Labyrinth” connotes a unicursal (I just learned this word today) route, or in other words single path, so that one cannot become lost, and no part of the structure is “wasted,” as it were - everything is integral, necessary, to a unified journey through. Observe that labyrinths can be used for meditative purposes, they are meant to deliver, not just to deliver a person from itself, but to deliver something from that person, or the world around them, that they might not have obtained without the labyrinth, to the person (for pop culture fans, think of the eponymous puppet and Jennifer Connelly movie, Labyrinth).

The structures offer completely different experiences, and yet from the ground they may seem to be the same thing. I believe that a person put into either a maze or labyrinth cannot know which one they are navigating, unless someone provides them with higher knowledge. Not even the end gives up the identity of the thing. Solving a maze might lead one to think they were in a labyrinth, when they were really just clever or lucky. A labyrinth may be so long, so serpentine, that a person fears they are lost in a maze, and when they emerge they may be convinced that cleverness or luck, and not the forgiving composition of the structure, liberated them, but they would be wrong.

A person can attempt to navigate a maze like it is a labyrinth, or the other way around, but I am not sure whether their intent alone has any power over the structure. However, a maze can be made into a labyrinth with proper supplies, as Theseus did when he carried Ariadne’s string into King Minos’s maze (traditionally referred to as a labyrinth but for my purposes, it is more accurately called a maze). But note that he did not do this under his own power. He received help to subvert the purpose of the maze.

I once delivered a speech in which I compared myself to the maze of Minos, and invoked the danger of the minotaur as my listeners and I attempted to navigate the space of my self. I concluded the speech by admitting my fear that perhaps I am actually the monster, and anyone who draws near to me does so at their own peril.

This is a tempting image to apply to myself when I reflect on the wreckage of my historic attempts to become more intimate with people, but again, I am not going to belabor that here.

There is always something to fear. I learn this lesson everyday, because everyday I am afraid of something (usually more than one thing). I fear sickness, I fear injury, I fear pickpockets, I fear missed transit connections, I fear embarrassment, I fear annoying or insulting people, I fear rejection, I fear being hated, I fear being alone, I fear being with a person who builds an even more elaborate, more punishing maze to put me in.

There is always something to be angry about - in my case, this is usually closely correlated with whatever I fear.

If life, if the self, is truly a maze or a labyrinth (still unknown), then my response to it has been to attempt to make my own yarn and thread my own path. On this long, long, winding, ultimately baffling trip - and now I am speaking not just of this literal European trip but my life - I have tried many times to coax a dead or weakened Minotaur into my grasp, I have tried to convince the maidens that I really am a hero capable of sweet smiles and words and deeds. I have committed the error of trying to enlist others into my journey under the delusion that it would improve both of our odds of victory and give us a myth to climb mountains with, but regardless of whether we believe or even say that we are the same, or understand one another, or are in it together, we are not.

I can’t bear how harsh these words look, but I don’t know how else to look at life. At the end of the day, I always go back to where I am from, and you go back to where you are from. Even if, by some miracle, we were going back to the same home, the same bed, once we fell asleep we would fall down different sides of the cliff of oblivion into impenetrable, private space.

This is not all that I feel. It is a persistent and omnipresent part of how I feel, and so I had to address it. Meanwhile, I must remember that, at least in part, I have explicitly chosen my state of affairs:

• I chose to give up on the Couchsurfers option early in my trip
• I chose to avoid hostels
• I chose to take the route of economic transactions, of paying for companionship, because it is the route I am most familiar and comfortable with
• I chose (not all the time, thank God) to believe that people wouldn’t just like me for me, wouldn’t or didn’t really want my company
• I chose to believe that I can’t trust people - not really

These selections have been part of my plan. Planning has been my plan, even when I try my hardest to live day-by-day. These choices have bounded the sorts of accidents that may occur. Certainly, there is always something that can snip the thread, break down one wall or build another one, bless or curse, bestow or rob, but I am unfortunately quite good at my planning, and at constructing a maze of sequesters to keep things where they belong...even if they don’t belong where they belong, even if it is only what I want/don’t want.

I promise that the next few posts are going to be about places and experiences. Again, it is not all doom and gloom, but we need to be able to be all that we are, and for me that means some of what you just navigated through. Thank you for your endurance!